It’s probably the ultimate goal of every professional sports club, whether it is about hockey, football or baseball: get the best players in your team to create a strong team that can run for championship.
The question has always been and will always be how to scout new and young talents, get the best players in your team and create this winning team? This requires a lot of information.
In the earlier days this information was collected by human scouts, roaming around countless different clubs watching players play and make analyses based on human decision making. With digitalisation many opportunities arise in this field. Take the example of Moneyball where the manager of club with one of the smallest budgets in the Major League achieved huge successes by using different scouting techniques. Rather than simply defining success based on the amount of homeruns, new statistical and innovative technologies could better predict the quality of players. An example is the slugging percentage which measures the total productivity of a batter. This unconventional way of scouting and thus replacing human scouts with technology was already a disruptive way of thinking back then (Kars, 2017).
Nowadays, digitalisation has become even more important throughout the whole scouting process. Sport clubs cannot operate without business analysts in their scouting department (Torgler, 2020). There are platforms collecting enormous amounts of data about players by watching worldwide competitions and games. These platforms offer such a valuable amount of data as no human scout could ever have captured. For example, the platform Wyscout uploads over 2000 football games every week. Specific actions can be searched for because Wyscout will provide related footage for this. Analysts working at clubs can use this enormous pool of data to make extensive analysis and provide extensive analysis of players, thus discovering new, unhidden or the most valuable talents
These platforms, however, still require human beings to eventually make the decision which player to buy. This raises the question whether scouting needs this human touch or that maybe AI can completely take over this process in the future?
Sources:
Torgler, B. (2020). Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum Computing in Sports. 21th Century Sports. Pp. 153-173. Accessed at: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-50801-2_9
Kars, J. (2017). Moneyball: Hoe stats en tech honkbal veranderde. Metronieuws. Accessed at: https://www.metronieuws.nl/lifestyle/tech/2017/10/moneyball-hoe-stats-en-tech-honkbal-veranderde/
